The Morning After with Sister Simone and Her Budget

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — After a thoroughly depressing time there on Wednesday, I headed back to St. Peter's on Tryon Street again this morning, except this time the action was in the parish hall in the basement, which looks like the parish hall in the basement of every Catholic church I've ever seen, right down to the very odd, scripturally-based motel art on the walls. Except this time Sister Simone Campbell was having a little Vatican II hoedown. This October, it will be 50 years since Blessed John XXIII called the council into session, and if you don't think there is a direct spiritual line between that moment and Sister Simone's appearance at the podium of the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, well, you simply haven't been paying attention to the little catechism lessons that the blog's been providing over the past year.

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"Amen," said Campbell. "The Holy Spirit seems to be stirring it up in just fabulous ways so it does seem to be reborn. Oh, my God, it's totally alive. I think religious women have been doing that all this time, but it's just that we've been doing it on the margins of society and nobody saw it. Now is the chance to lift it up."

Campbell's brief but powerful appearance at the podium was so compelling — "You have to walk a long way! Then you have to 'enjoy the house.' That's what I was told before I went out, 'Enjoy the house' — that people may have may have missed a couple of the most powerful things about it. First, during the most pro-choice night of the most pro-choice political convention in history, Campbell talked about a sick woman named Margaret, and she said that our mutual responsibility for caring for the Margarets of this world was "part of my pro-life stance," and everybody cheered anyway. And, also, it was the only speech from the podium that did not specifically endorse the Democratic ticket. It was a simple plea for what used to be called the social gospel, and why the budget proposed by Paul Ryan and endorsed by Willard Romney is a violation of both the social gospel, and the most important parts of the four actual ones.

(Naturally, the whole business set the conservative Catholics ablaze on the Twitter machine. Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review may be lighting so many candles under her portrait of Pius IX that you can see it from space, and Bill Donahue probably felt compelled to give himself an extra couple of lashes, although that may have been just for fun.)

But Sister Simone's Nuns On The Bus tour started before the house went quiet, and before she brought the house down. The bus started moving in June, and her movement has been running the line, from the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin's "budget" on down to Catholic churches like this one, since well before then. "We started opposing it from the beginning," Campbell told me. "We follow this stuff. That's our mission — to follow federal policy. I am totally puzzled by it. It's the craziest hill in the world to plant your flag on, because it undermines our nation. It's all about individualism, and that's not who we are. It's not who we are as people of faith and it's not who we are in the Constitution. The Constitution makes it abundantly clear that it's We, The People."

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She wasn't just enjoying her newfound celebrity at St. Peter's this morning. She was conducting a workshop where other people could learn how to become honorary Nuns On The Bus. And, in the message, you can hear the voice of the little pudgy pope who called the Council and who, right before he died, told the entire church:

Human society, as we here picture it, demands that men be guided by justice, respect the rights of others and do their duty. It demands, too, that they be animated by such love as will make them feel the needs of others as their own, and induce them to share their goods with others, and to strive in the world to make all men alike heirs to the noblest of intellectual and spiritual values. Nor is this enough; for human society thrives on freedom, namely, on the use of means which are consistent with the dignity of its individual members, who, being endowed with reason, assume responsibility for their own actions.

She told them about trying to meet with Congressman Steve King, everyone's favorite paranoid hysteric from Iowa. She talked about trying to meet with him and his staff and, finally despairing of the whole business, trying to slip a copy of the nuns's "Faithful Budget" under the door of King's district office. "The pictures of me trying to push it through the door, and slip it under the door. That became a big deal," she said. "And I have to say, nobody stood us up after that.

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